Where to begin with Luca Guadagnino

Since Call Me by Your Name in 2017, at least one Luca Guadagnino project has premiered every year – be it a feature film, short, documentary or miniseries. While all of them align with his unique style of patient camerawork, severe colour grading and extended bouts of agony and eroticism, each release has adopted a new tone, a new type of conflict, a new thematic intensity. Moving from Italian to English language features as his fame and following have increased, his filmography covers a spectrum of desire and control, from spirited youth to weary maturity.

He was born in Palermo, Sicily to an Algerian mother and a Sicilian father, and his prolificacy as a filmmaker is indebted to his range of cultural interests. He wrote a university thesis on Jonathan Demme, dabbles in interior design, and has shot video campaigns for designer fashion houses including Armani, Loewe, Chanel and Salvatore Ferragamo. 

But the prestige of these collaborations doesn’t get in the way of his films being lurid, explicit or snarky when they need to be. Moving away from the more purposefully arthouse style of his early features, through the 2010s Guadagnino built a reputation for films about striking, aching emotion, where passion can be fleeting, but pain – be it through lacerated flesh or intimate heartbreak – can last a lifetime.

Based on a screenplay by James Ivory of Merchant Ivory fame, Call Me by Your Name wasn’t your average mainstream breakout hit; it was a phenomenon that threatened to sweep the Academy Awards. Although the film built off the themes and style of the previous instalments in Guadagnino’s ‘Desire trilogy’, I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015), this queer summer romance is Guadagnino’s most accessible and appealing film. In his debut as a leading man, Timothée Chalamet plays 1980s teenager Elio who, during the sun-soaked tranquility of a family holiday in Lombardy, develops an attraction to older grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer). It’s a film where emotions may not be spoken, but they always lie just beneath the surface, readable on the young characters’ faces.

“I totally, consciously, didn’t want to cast any kind of shadow of sadness or conflict over the story,” said Guadagnino, which was partly why it was so difficult to find funding for the film (it ended up earning $40 million over its budget). Even so, Call Me by Your Name makes viewers lean in to the film’s intense emotions, as romantic clarity eludes its hormonal protagonist under perfect blue Italian skies.

In contrast to Call Me by Your Name, 2024’s Challengers is brimming with dramatic, interpersonal conflict. It pits three athletic, attractive young stars – Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist – as tennis prodigies who lock into a tense love triangle that will define the next 13 years of their lives. Justin Kuritzkes’ script offsets their professional trajectories with physical injury and personal inadequacy, but, as the years go by, their attractions and tensions are charged with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s infectious techno score and the restless camerawork of Call Me by Your Name cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Guadagnino’s obsession with desire is again the heartbeat of Challengers, even in his most commercial and frenetic slice of entertainment.

Guadagnino’s other films also offer rich, if more opaque explorations of desire and indulgence. The way that traditional structures of wealth can smother our relationships to both place and self is central to the first two ‘Desire’ films, I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. Each of them stars Tilda Swinton as characters cooped up in expensive Italian houses, far from their original home, but while the soft-focus, subjective perspective of I Am Love pushes her Russian expat character towards an adulterous but liberatory affair, the arch, satiric humour of A Bigger Splash sees Swinton’s near-mute rockstar – who is holidaying with her lover on the small Italian island of Pantelleria – implicated in the film’s social critique to a more severe degree. None of A Bigger Splash’s obnoxious, jealous characters (played by Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson) make it out unscathed. 

Guadagnino’s two flirtations with the horror genre feel more in tune with his own work than with your average coven or cannibal film. Although he is a lifelong fan of Dario Argento, Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria (2018) barely shows any influence from the giallo king. Rather, it’s an austere but still shocking witch story with a distinct psychoanalytic perspective, which pits A Bigger Splash’s two women – Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson – against one another in a supernatural battle between youth and motherhood. Guadagino returned to young love with Bones and All (2022), a cannibal road trip that’s equally mature and adolescent, where the transient sensations of teenage affection are contrasted with the disturbing permanence of violence.

Guadagnino’s latest, the William S. Burroughs adaptation Queer, stars a faultless, mewling Daniel Craig as Lee, an expat writer living in 1950s Mexico City. Including a hallucinatory sequence featuring body-horror effects, the film plays like a fusion of the director’s genre films with his restrained examinations of fatally internal desire, here represented by an attractive young sailor (Drew Starkey). It’s an excavation of self-loathing and addiction that, despite scenes of explicit sex, forever denies Lee the true satisfaction he craves.

We Are Who We Are (2020), Guadagnino’s HBO miniseries about teens on a US military base in Italy, is his most underrated work – a fearless defence of Gen Z’s imperfect search for identity – but the mostly plotless, serialised story could be off-putting to newcomers. His short work, including Walking Stories (2013), The Staggering Girl (2019) and O Night Divine (2021), is mainly for completists, but if you want to see Guadagnino in more experimental form, his ambitious debut, the 1999 crime thriller The Protagonists, playfully blends fact and fiction as it unpicks a real London murder. It begins his collaborations with Tilda Swinton but is let down by wobbly command of tone and shallow visual provocations – faults that quickly dropped away as Guadagnino’s career took flight.

Queer is in cinemas from 13 December.